Robert Wilson - Eureka Street - A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

There was silence after he finished. I waited for the boos and catcalls. How foolish. It wasn't until a few seconds into the cheers and whoops that I realized that everybody loved it. Weren't there any Protestants here? I looked over at Chuckie but he was blithe. He hadn't even been listening, a condition he shared with many of his faithmates.

The fat poet milked the applause. Some of the other scribes joined him on the podium. The rapture sounded as though it would never end. These culture vultures were frenzied in their acclaim. After a time the hubbub died down. The chubby humanist waited for total silence, then leaned close to the microphone.

`Tiocfaidh ar La,' he bellowed.

Chuckle jumped in his skin. `What?' he squeaked.

Thankfully, no one heard him in the resumption of the tumult.

It went on. It was as bad as could be. The great man, Ghinthoss, got up and read. He read about hedges, the lanes and the bogs. He covered rural topography in detail. It felt like a geography field trip. In a startling departure, he read a poem about a vicious Protestant murder of a nice Catholic. There were no spades in this poem, and only one hedge, but by this time the crowd were whipped into such a sectarian passion they would have lauded him if he'd picked his nose with any amount of rhythm or even in a particularly Irish manner.

He milked it all. Then he took some questions. I'm not saying they were entirely facile but their content was mostly eugenic. These people gathered close together, snug in their verse, their culture, they had one question. Why can't Protestants do this? they asked themselves. What's wrong with those funny people? Why aren't they spiritual like us?

Ghinthoss was grandly forgiving. He seemed to think it was not all the Protestants' fault. Given a million or so years of Catholic supremacy, Protestant brows might lift, they might start with a few uneasy grunts, invent the wheel and wear bearskins. If we were kind, the poor dumb brutes might be able to manage a few domestic poetic tasks in a century or so.

'Mr Ghinthoss,' I asked in a pause (oh, I didn't want to, I couldn't help myself, I bit my tongue, I put my hands over my mouth but it just would come out),'Mr Ghinthoss,' I enquired, 'could you tell us, whether, great poet that you are, whether.. whether your dick reaches your arse yet?'

I was always good at public speaking.

As I was being thrown out I arranged to meet the others. They wanted to go to Lavery's — I was being lifted in the air by two ten-foot revolutionaries at that point so I couldn't debate the venue.

I checked myself out in the bathroom of a hamburger joint nearby. A graze on my forehead, a cut on my lip. Oh, my poor fucking face. It was getting boring, this Jake-beating thing, it was happening every day. I used to be so pretty. I used to be so tough.

I didn't want to go into Lavery's until the others were there so I nipped into Mary's bar just to see if she was there.

She was. Her face fell like I don't know what when I walked in. The place was pretty empty. I knew if I sat at the bar she wouldn't have to wait on me. I could easily have saved her that.

I sat at a table near the wall.

'Can I get you anything?'

`Hello, Mary.!

'What would you like to drink?'

'Mary, no grief. Just say hello:

'Hello'

`Double gin. Neat. No ice.'

There was a pause.

'Please,' I added.

The firmness in her face fled. Abruptly she pulled out a chair and sat opposite me. `Listen,' she said, `Paul's terrified that he's going to get into trouble for that thing between you. Some detectives have interviewed him. They said they were going to talk to you.They told him he could get a prison sentence, never mind lose his job'

`They came today.!

`What did you say?'

'I told them nothing had happened.That it was all a mistake.'

`What about the stuff in the papers?'

I told her I didn't know how it had happened. I told her it had nothing to do with me. Then I told her about Aoirghe.

It was lovely for a while there. I'd never had Mary listen so carefully to what I said. I'd never had her so interested. It was because of her concern and love for another man, sure, but I didn't care. It was nice anyway. My aspirations were thrillingly modest.

She laughed about Aoirghe. `You've got woman trouble, Jake,' she said. `You always will have. Men like you always do.'

It had been going so well up to that point. I had been deciding that I liked her enough not to care about anything else.That it was OK if she didn't want to sleep with me again, I could allow that. Then she had to go and say such a thing. What kind of man was I like? Where were these men like me? What was wrong with us? Why couldn't we get laid?

She brought me my drink. I dallied there for a quarter-hour. I didn't touch the gin. (I could never drink gin neat. I'd only ordered it that I might seem butch and epic.) As I was leaving I said goodbye and told her that she was wasn't entirely true. She kissed my face. I felt worse.

I went into Lavery's. Slat and Deasely were already there. They'd been thrown out of the poetry reading minutes after me. Slat had asked the poet whether it was entirely nice to kill soldiers and got himself chucked out. Deasely had reacted to Slat's expulsion by bellowing, `I like Protestants,' and had soon followed his friend. Feeling some pride, I bought them many drinks. I wondered if anyone at the verse gig could have imagined that they had ejected three Catholics. It seemed unlikely.

By the time the others arrived, I was feeling dreadful. I'd had a couple of drinks. I didn't want to get drunk. Lavery's was horrible. The men, the seeking bachelors and married rogues. The big laughs, the glittering eyes, sharp after groups of women. The beer-buying, the phonecall-making, the endless pissing. I was tired of the Irish and their bogus dissipation.

There were four main sets of people.

There were the expected groups of Alcoholics-inResidence, giving their seminars in the corners. All Belfast bars had was no surprise. Lavery's had one enormous difference. Lavery's seemed to be running a training scheme, an apprenticeship. There was a tableful of guys who were beginning their slide. They'd started out in Lavery's; as they passed their wino exams they might fan out to other bars or actual indigence but they'd started here and they couldn't stop. They'd always be Lavery's graduates.

There was a whole set of men in their late thirties, forties or even fifties who had some vague attachment to or yen for the music business. Wrinkled, obese, they were identifiable by their grey ponytails and the remarkable sexual success they achieved with quite attractive women in their early twenties.This success gave these men confidence. It had not dawned on them that this apparent the more glaring because my relatively handsome friends and I couldn't get a because the physical laws were in abeyance in the warp of Lavery's time and space. It was because of the special physics prevalent there that they had a chance. On the street, they were just sad old geeks.

The third group was the largest. Students from Queen's. Kids too dumb to go to a proper university, they hammed it up in this bar. Almost all country boys and girls, they did their best to be urban, metropolitan. It was only weeks since they'd been joy-riding tractors and shagging sheep.

And finally, of course, there was a selection of astounding dark-haired girls running their fingers through their hair, walking up and down past the bar, their eyes meeting no man's.

About four hundred and fifty people of various ages on three floors spending around six or seven thousand pounds, they sweated and bellowed through their evening. They tried to make it look like fun but they couldn't manage it. I was one of the few people who could admit that I was there because I had no life.